The Birth of the Brave New World: The New Yorker has unearthed this amazing article, written in 1936, about an early TV demonstration. The article was written by E.B. White (who wrote Charlotte's Web) and his dry skepticism is a delightful to read.

We sat in a darkened room squarely in front of a receiving set and, as we understand the matter, the persons and objects which we saw were down on the third floor of the same building, where they were first photographed televisually by an iconoscope, thence sent by direct wire to the Empire State Building, and then came back on a megacycle to the sixty-second floor of R.C.A. The magical unlikelihood of this occasion was not lessened any by the fact that a stranger wearing a telephone around his neck was crawling about on all fours in the darkness at our feet. This didn't make television seem any too practical for the living room of one's own home, although of course homes are changing.

If only current day techno-pundits could write so well. And get this:

Try and appreciate our situation: we were in a dark room looking into a television set at a television set which was showing a picture of a moving picture.

Somebody should have shown them the Sopranos.